Submarines & Beetles 丨 New Powers

Editor

Imagination has always been the "birthplace" of literature. Throughout the past two years of youth literature creation, many writers have used fantasy, imagination and allegory to mix social history, daily experience and private historical memory, and to push and deform daily time and space with either strange and warm imagination or broad and calm imagination, reconstructing other realities of life. Imagination is like the tip of the iceberg that emerges from the water, showing its clean, profound, and light aesthetic creativity that connects with reality but is completely different from reality, and becomes a "magic weapon" to re-polish Chinese writing, through which the novel regains the superpower of heaven and earth, and has the free space to fly and breathe. It is true that fiction and reality are not binary opposites, but what kind of relationship should the fiction of imagination be to the real life of society? Can imagination be embedded in it to reflect the real life of inner, fragmented, high landscapes? In an age like this, is imagination a prism on the road to reality? This issue of "New Forces" invited Huang Panpan, editor of Chinese literature books, and young scholars Zhao Tiancheng and Fan Siping to talk about many topics related to this.

Submarine with beetles

Wen 丨 Fan Siping

Fan Siping is a PhD candidate in modern and contemporary Chinese literature, whose research interests are contemporary fiction and cultural criticism.

It is hard to imagine any literary work that can be detached from imagination. Young novelist Chen Chuncheng's Submarine at Night discusses fiction and imagination itself in imaginary works. He tells the reader through two short stories: as long as the fantasy is made strong enough and detailed enough, it is possible to blend with the real world and connect somewhere.

For examples of imaginary objects that are realistic enough to enter the real world, ancient Greece has a very classic story. Pygmalion carved a beautiful girl from ivory, and Venus, the goddess of love, gave life to the statue and married them. There is also an idiom in China that "the finishing touches to the dragon", after the dragon sutra on the mural is "finished", "whiskers, thunder and lightning break the wall, take the clouds to the heavens". Dreams come true and stones become gold, which is probably the simplest and most eternal wish of human beings. In the 1950s cartoon "Ma Liang", the protagonist Ma Liang drew the sea on the wall, and the sea appeared; Ma Liang drew the boat, and the emperor and his wives got on the boat; Ma Liang painted the style, and the ship started. In "Submarine at Night", the protagonist's imaginary submarine and the submarine that salvaged Borges coins met at the bottom of the sea, and imagination and reality "blended" and "connected". At this moment, a huge reorganization of space-time occurred.

In the 1980s, Chinese avant-garde novel writers were the first to contact Borges and learn from them, representing writers like Ma Yuan's narrative habit of "making falsehoods come true, deliberately obliterating the boundaries between true and false." In the novel "Fiction", Ma Yuan plays with his authorship and the identity of the narrator who calls himself "Ma Yuan", deliberately confusing the two and creating a foggy reading experience. For example, in Tashi Dawa's "Tibet, the Soul Tied to the Leather Rope Buckle", the author of the novel goes to the place where the novel takes place to find the whereabouts of the protagonist of the novel. These "narrative traps" that break the boundaries between virtual and reality are much more complex than "Submarines at Night".

In Chen Chuncheng's imagination, the "submarine" is like a cradle of a baby, like a mother's womb, a utopia with eternal safety and tranquility, which eliminates all dangerous, complex, and unfamiliar experiences. The so-called adventures that the submarine experiences take place on the level of absolute safety, and it is even the savior of the danger of others. But in the face of real danger, the protagonist is gradually defeated and becomes an ordinary person without imagination. The protagonist avoids reality in the novel, and it is the author who avoids the treatment and description of the complexity of reality. It's still a kind of juvenile writing. The truly complex, varied, profound experience of life is obscured, and all we see is the underwater world where a little mermaid lives, not the real one.

In Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gregor becomes a Beetle. But Kafka's Beetle not only did not avoid reality, but on the contrary intensified all the contradictions of reality in the most extreme direction. Submarines can swim alone on the vast ocean floor, away from their families, studies, society, and even their time; the Beetles struggle to survive in a cramped apartment, facing their father, mother, sister, and secretary-general. The "submarine" is the protective shell of the Chen turners, huge, stable, and eternal; in Kafka's writing, the Beetle exposes Grigore's ugliness, weakness, incompetence, and vulnerability. Kafka was so powerful, everyone said so, there was no doubt about it, but what was so great about him was not that he imagined a beetle with a thunderous sound, but that he imagined the most expressive leg of the beetle. This is the true genius imagination. When Gregor wanted to sit up, "all the other legs seemed to be released, fluttering in pain in excitement." When the secretary-general went to Grigore's house to look for him, Gregor "almost froze, and the thin legs waved even more hurriedly." Many people see Kafka only see "beetles", and when they write novels, they write that one day they wake up and become a praying mantis, or a mouse, thinking that it is Kafka II. The reason for the failure is that they can only think of the "Beetle" part, but they can't think of the "leg" part. Kafka's words range from "trembling helplessly", "moving non-stop", "fluttering in extreme excitement", "hulai", "waving more hurriedly", to "clinging", "standing firmly underground", "completely obedient", and we see Gregor's step-by-step beetle-like "live broadcast". The process of Gregor's beetle is the process of Gregor's dehumanization. Chen Turner, who has gradually lost his imagination, is not another Gregor? But many novelists today do not have the courage or ability to write about this chaotic and degenerate process, and can only praise a cartoon submarine that will not change.

In my opinion, what kind of imagination is a good literary imagination? That is, literature weaves a rigorous, meticulous imagination, not to escape reality, but to pierce reality.